A host of grassroots campaigns and movements, including Rethink Aadhaar, are organising a People’s Tribunal on Aadhaar-related issues in Delhi on February 29 and March 1, 2020.

Please see the note below for details; you can also visit the event page for more details and registration. 

When: February 29 & March 1, 2020, 9 am onwards

Where: 301, ISI (10, Lodhi Institutional Area, New Delhi)

Event Page: 

https://hasgeek.com/rethinkaadhaar/aadhaar-tribunal-2020/

Note: We request RSVPs from those interested as seating is limited. 

Also, while entry to the Tribunal is free, we encourage you to contribute and help make the Tribunal more successful and impactful. To contribute, please visit:

https://www.ourdemocracy.in/Campaign/aadhaartribunal

About the Tribunal

This Tribunal seeks to review the on-ground impact over the ten years of the Aadhaar project. In particular, the two-day event will focus on the aftermath of the SC judgment, and the continued coercion through databasing of citizens since. It will feature testimonies, expert commentaries, and analysis of the impact on welfare schemes (food rations, NREGA wages, old age and disability pensions, health programmes, scholarships, children’s midday meal schemes and admissions), gender and caste inequalities, and continuing privacy and data security concerns.

Through this Tribunal, we will gather evidence from the grassroots which, with a report from the jury (comprising a former parliamentarian and a former SC judge among others), will be presented to the public in order to develop a substantive critique of the government’s continued reliance on the Aadhaar number as a “truth machine”. This is now an even more worrying development given the focus on updating the National Population Register (NPR) and subsequently preparing the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRC). We also hope to build on the Tribunal and push government agencies further to ensure that no one suffers any exclusion or deprivation for lack of an Aadhaar number, and that there is - at the very least - complete compliance with the Supreme Court judgment. 

Organizing this Tribunal will require significant resources in terms of people’s time, efforts and, more pertinently, logistics - especially considering the fact that we plan to conduct follow up engagements with local stakeholders in at least five to six other cities besides Delhi. We request your kind support to conduct the Tribunal and widen the public debate on the Aadhaar project as well as the looming risks of making our rights and even citizenship conditional to enrolling ourselves in error-ridden databases coercively.

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to Raghu at 97177-49998.